Governments ultimately deliver outcomes through thousands of people making decisions at local government, nonprofits, and service provider organizations. Technical assistance is how those decisions improve over time.
In theory, technical assistance is simple: make sure the people implementing policy know what to do, and how, with advice and guidance from state and federal agencies. It’s one of the most important aspects of how government agencies operate.
But government employees I’ve spoken with acknowledge that the status quo of how TA is delivered is fundamentally broken.
IT HAPPENS EVERY DAY
Imagine a federal program with millions of dollars in grants to disburse to state and local agencies. Before a dollar moves, program staff must define which entities are eligible, build a rubric, identify the metrics that define success and community impact, and align stakeholders across thousands of organizations nationwide. Then they must make potential grantees aware of the grant.
A significant share of that upstream work is time spent interviewing people and defining criteria. It’s careful, expensive work. And none of it matters if the dollars don’t reach the organizations that can improve the lives of the people the grant was written for.
FROM POLICY TO ACTION
Every major government initiative depends on hundreds or thousands of implementing partners from local government agencies and nonprofits to service providers.
For example, a state board of elections spends significant time advising election clerks on hiring and recruiting, advocating for rule changes with the state government, and helping educate the public about local election processes. The same is true for public health programs, veterans’ programs, homelessness coordination, and dozens of other initiatives. Technical assistance makes these programs possible, but it is delivered ad hoc, typically at a single point in time, rather than continuously meeting ongoing needs.
3 BROKEN ELEMENTS
Today’s approach to delivering technical assistance results in bottlenecks that prevent expertise from reaching the practitioners who need it when they need it.
- It doesn’t scale. As provider networks grow in complexity, the people with the answers become single points of failure. Professional staff burn time managing unwieldy contact lists and answering the same question repeatedly. Support becomes uneven and some organizations never get help.
- It falls short when it’s needed most. Service providers need technical assistance during implementation or when working through an edge case, not just at kickoff. Without current guidance, providers fall back on what they already know, which renders the upfront investment in knowledge sharing moot. Meanwhile, guidance gets buried in inboxes and shared drives, and knowledge walks out the door when a state or federal employee leaves.
- It’s opaque. Agency leaders struggle to see which providers are receiving assistance, how engaged partners are across the ecosystem, or where implementation is systemically breaking down. Problems surface after a missed deadline, when it is too late.
As federal policy continues to shift and states and local governments contend with budget cuts and turnover, technical assistance capacity doesn’t scale linearly with headcount.
TECHNOLOGY FOR TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
The bulk of investment in TA programs goes to consulting engagements and professional services. Consultants have expertise and they get the content right. Where TA falls short is delivery and resilience. Without a real-time connection across the network—one that keeps knowledge from fragmenting when a contract ends—technical assistance can’t do what it’s supposed to do.
Hiring more consultants is a temporary fix. And like many state and local programs, TA runs on outdated tools and the elbow grease of already overworked public servants.
Public servants are often technologically lacking in comparison to their private sector peers, through no fault of their own. Trying to create a real-time ecosystem of people involved in TA for a program—and similar programs—requires more than listservs and spreadsheets.
Modern software that’s purpose-built for interagency collaboration, communication, and the knowledge-sharing work central to technical assistance represents a fundamental shift from a series of disconnected, point-in-time activities to lasting implementation infrastructure.
Tools built for TA must meet two requirements. First, they must capture intelligence from across the network. The answer to a question from a nonprofit employee in one county is probably useful to a local government employee on the other side of the state. Rather than remaining siloed, that knowledge bridges jurisdictional gaps and connects everyone involved in delivering a service.
Second, tools built for TA must preserve institutional memory. Instead of an answer languishing in one person’s inbox, it’s available to everyone in the ecosystem—and to everyone working on a similar initiative years from now.
Together, those two capabilities represent technical assistance as a virtuous loop. Rather than experts pushing out ad hoc information, they can see what the field is asking, provide better answers, and get sharper questions in return.
Layering AI onto the structured loop of TA data makes it possible to answer routine questions instantly while surfacing emerging implementation challenges back to program staff. Every interaction strengthens the knowledge available to the entire network.
A STANDING CAPABILITY
We must shift from treating technical assistance as a deliverable to treating it as a capability. A deliverable has a start date, an end date, and a final invoice. A capability persists. It gets stronger the more people use it, and it survives the turnover, budget cycles, and contract expirations that currently erase institutional memory every few years.
That distinction matters more now than it did five years ago. Federal requirements are shifting, budgets are volatile, and the people who know how programs work are retiring. Agencies can’t hire their way through that. But they can build a system where an answer given once is available to everyone who needs it next.
Madeleine Smith is the cofounder and CEO of Civic Roundtable.